I'm 27 years old. I've been playing PC games since I was 8.

In 21 years of PC gaming, I have never been as frustrated with a game as I am with Rage. In this day and age, with project staffs exceeding a hundred people, with multi-million dollar development budgets, and with development times exceeding two years, it is inexcusable for a triple A developer like id or Bethesda to release a highly anticipated title that is broken to the point of being unplayable.

In the past 24 hours, I have spent half my available game time trying to configure the game so it doesn't look like something circa 1997, and the other half playing a game that stutters and freezes every ten seconds making parts significantly more difficult than they had to be. Oh yeah, and it crashes every fifteen minutes or so.

What gets me is that these are widespread, game-breaking bugs that should have been caught in QA. There's no reason why something like this should have happened, especially for PC users who are id and Bethesda's bread and butter customers.

I'm putting Rage back on the shelf until there's a patch that fixes this stuff. If it were almost any other developer I'd give them a pass, but id and Bethesda are two of the devs that always get my money the first day something comes out. Now, I can't say that.

So that this doesn't turn into a complete complain-fest, here's my issue.

Every ten to fifteen seconds, the gameplay pauses, the audio keeps going, then the audio stops and the game continues on.

Here are my system specs:
Core 2 Duo E8400
GeForce 460 GTX
Xonar DX Audio
Seagate 7200RPM HDD
Asus P5Q-Pro Motherboard
Corsair 4GB (2 DIMM) DDR2-1033

I just don't know what else to do.

I couldn't agree with you more. I spent the first 2 days forum hunting trying every suggestion under the sun to be able to play this game. I finally got it to work well enough to play and now I'm at the Mutant Bash part and it crashes every single time. Are they even fixing it?

im running a ATI6970, but i was having the same glitchy stuttery issue as well. If you up the game priority in the task manager to "real time" i found that it stopped completely

I feel ya man, I really do. I've been trying to get this game to work since it came out. I've tried everything and nothing has worked. I also have similar comp specs as you.

e8400
8gb ddr2 800mhz ram
same hd
radeon hd 6850 1gb

I can run any game out atm at med-max settings with 40+ fps no problem. Rage is pretty much unplayable. I gave up already and got my money back. I might buy this game again when its 20 bucks and they have all of the issues ironed out.

This thread should help you all. I know it helped me plenty. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2156747&page=17